BUSTED: Anonymous Uncovers Corporate Proposal to Take Down Wikileaks

(DAILY KOS) Anonymous counter-intelligence operations have uncovered evidence of an effort by Bank Of America (BoA) to disrupt both Wikileaks and Anonymous. Details of BoA’s involvement began emerging on February 8th, 2011, during Anonymous’ Operation #HBGary.

Operation #HBGary was retribution against (in)security firm HBGary, and its associate company HBGary Federal, for threatening to release innacurate and fallacious information about Anonymous. During the operation, Anonymous double-penetrated HBGary’s corporate network, compromised the personal email and social networking accounts of several HBGary employees (evidence of which is still online at the time of this document’s creation), retrieved some 50,000 corporate emails, discovered HBGary “product” source code, and wiped Aaron Barr’s personal iPad (for shits ‘n’ giggles).

Among the emails retrieved from HBGary, Anonymous uncovered communications between Bank of America’s legal representation, HBGary, Palantir, and BericoTechnologies detailing efforts to weaken Wikileaks through misinformation and targeted cyber attacks.

In the proposal to be presented to Bank of America, representatives from the three security companies outlined strategic operations against Wikileaks and its supporters, including psy-ops and cyber attacks against the Wikileaks infrastructure and its supporters.

BoA’s interest in supressing/disrupting Wikileaks is evidence that they fear becoming the next focal point of Wikileaks, and that they, and their associates, will stop at nothing to protect their own selfish interests at the expense of innocent people around the globe. Anonymous will not sit idle while corporate greed and government power-mongering wreak havok on civil liberties.

The unedited emails are included at the end of this release and the proposal can be viewed on-line at: http://goo.gl/…

Anonymous has a message for corporations and governments around the world:
Fuck with the truth at your own peril.

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.

P.S.: The kind of “research” being conducted by HBGary and co. is a flagrant violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service. See Article 5.7 for further clarification:

* “Article 5. Protecting People’s Rights. Subarticle 7. If you collect information from users, you will: obtain their consent, make it clear you (and not Facebook) are the one collecting their information, and post a privacy policy explaining what information you collect and how you will use it.”

One other thing. I think we need to highlight people like Glenn
Greenwald. Glenn was critical in the Amazon to OVH transition and
helped wikileaks provide access to information during the transition.
It is this level of support we need to attack. These are established
proffessionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if
pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the
mentality of most business professionals. Without the support of people
like Glenn wikileaks would fold.

A few other thoughts. Obvious when attacking any adversary you attack
their week points. In this case their strength is their global
following and volunteer staff. This allows them to have a very loose
organization, probably little if any direction or coordination is
actually passed it is just inferred as part of the cause. Julien
pronounces and the minions follow. Larger infrastructure is fairly
pointless to attack because they have so many other points so many other
organizations that are willing to distribute the information and help
them get new hosting services.

Weak points.
Financial. They are under increasing financial pressure because
authorities are blocking their funding sources. Need to help enumerate
these. Also need to get people to understand that if they support the
organization we will come after them. Transaction records are easily
identifiable.
Security. As I pointed out. Need to get to the swedish document
submission server. Need to create doubt about their security and
increase awareness that interaction with Wikilieaks will expose you.
Mission. As we have already seen there is a fracture amongst the
followers because of a belief that Julien is going astray from the cause
and has selected his own mission of attacking the US.

Despite they publicity, I do not believe Wikileaks is in a healthy
position right now. I think their weakness are causing great stress in
the organization and we need to capitalize on those.

Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages
around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit
fake documents and then call out the error.
• Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure
stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done.
• Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters.
This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France
putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.
• Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks
activities. Sustained pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates
concern and doubt amongst moderates.
• Search for leaks. Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of
employees.

“It is this level of support we need to attack. These are established
proffessionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if
pushed will choose professional preservation over cause”

Thanks Eli. We are awaiting the finalized TA from you and are then prepared to send John a very basic proposal and the completed TAs. Please see attached for the draft version of the proposal and respond with any comments/corrections. We kept it pretty simple and just outlined major deliverables and costing for both Phase I (pilot) and Phase II (enduring-by month). Please let me know if you think we need to add more detail anywhere.

Also, you will notice in the costing portion (at the bottom of the doc), that we’ve modified the breakdown of how much each partner will get per month. This is pending your agreement/approval, but both Aaron and I have discussed this and wanted to lay out our thinking on why we should split the Phase II costs the way we did (800k for Palantir, 600k for HBGary, 600k for Berico – per month):

Risk – because this is a services-heavy effort, both Berico and HBGary will be taking some pretty large risk in hiring additional personnel to support. If the project only ends up lasting a few months, we will have made significant personnel moves and be left to deal with any potential fallout.

Finder’s Fee – although we acknowledge that Palantir established and initially nurtured the relationship with H&W, we believe this “finder’s fee” is more than covered between the 50% you are getting during Phase I and the 40% overall you’ll continue to get throughout the effort. We feel that Palantir continuing to receive 50% of all total revenue every month for this project is a bit excessive.

Level of Effort – as you’ve mentioned multiple times, Palantir wants this deal to be “purely transactional.” While we acknowledge and appreciate the initial support you’ll be providing as we get stood up, I think we can all agree that the majority of the work on this will be done by Berico and HBGary. As such, we feel that a more equitable distribution of revenue is fair (in line with what I outlined in the draft proposal).

Also, please see notes below (in blue) from Aaron ref this same subject. As he mentions, we are extremely grateful to Palantir for bringing us into this opportunity, but want to ensure we’re looking at the revenue breakdown from an objective business perspective. I’m about to board my flight from JFK to Dubai, but please feel free to reach out to Katie Crotty (202-841-9691), Aaron, or Sam with questions or to discuss further.

————-
Pat,

Reviewing the cost breakdown on the phase 2 proposal I have a few concerns.

The effort is only for six months and it is a substantial effort, which means I will need to hire to staff the positions. I have plenty of folks from my old team that are waiting for the opportunity to come and work for me again, so staffing is not the issue, but it only being a six month contract the risk of their not being follow on work I have to take under serious consideration.

This is a firm fixed price contract which again measurably raises risk. Since this is work that is somewhat new territory, at least in the commercial space this makes it somewhat challenging to price. Berico-HBGary are on the hook to deliver on the requirements that are agreed upon for the price that we set.

These two risk factors bring me to a single conclusion. I do not believe the revenue breakdown makes sense. $1M for Palantir for virtually no risk for staffing or performance and 1/2 that for Berico and HBGary which are taking on measurable risk does not make sense. I believe we need to more evenly distribute the value.

I do not want to seem ungrateful for Palantir bringing us this incredible opportunity, I am very grateful, but from a business perspective it just doesn’t match the levels of risk each organization is undertaking.

We need to make some revisions to the TAs and T&Cs for the Berico/H&W deal.

* Pending final approval to send this out from Shyam, we should re-insert exclusivity language, but along the lines of: “Palantir will exclusively partner with Berico in conjunction with Hunton & Williams to license this product to law firms for corporate campaign work. Palantir will still reserve the right to license Palantir to law firms for other purposes nothwithstanding this exclusivity agreement.” I’m actually not sure how this should be phrased, but we need to basically make them feel comfortable that we’re not going to specifically go out and resell their knowledge of corporate campaign work to other customers. Given that there are likely few firms that explicitly do this kind of work, this seems like a reasonable concession for us to make. * We need to break out the phase I deal separately so it’s clear that they can get a month pilot up front for $100k of Palantir plus $50k each to Berico and HBGary. Again I’m not sure how this is structured, but John expl
icitly told me that they’re going to want to cover the pilot phase explicitly in the agreement. The rest of the deal should have the same structure as before.Sorry about the complexity here… this is a very complicated case. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous.